14 Feb
2020
14 Feb
'20
2:42 p.m.
On Feb 14, 2020, at 14:19, Patrick Finnegan via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
?On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 4:36 PM jim stephens via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I have a 3/260 with the ?storage pedestal?, a pair of 8? SMD drives in a deskside chassis
the same size as the system chassis.
It was originally purchased and used by Mentor Graphics. A now-former employee bought it
and used it for a while, then put it in his open barn, where it sat for a dozen years. He
gave it to me last year and I am trying to get it running for VCF-PNW in a bit over a
month. The big problem is a particular bit is always staying on during the memory path
data test, so it won?t even come up to the boot prom. If I can?t get past that, the lack
of SMD cables are not a problem :)
alan
PS I forgot to thank Liam for offering assistance, so thanks, Liam.
SMD external cables probably weren't that
common. The systems I saw
which were of such as 4/280 etc, rack mounted had the cabling internal
to the bays and were of the ribbon variety. They used VME bus cards in
a large size carrier for the controllers in the system frame. The
system frame had cards that were about 18" high with an extra bus
connector. But if you aligned the VME cars to fit two of them, there
was apparently a vme bus.
Those systems that i saw had either 68k processors, or early Sparc
processors. The sun boards used all three bus connectors and the other
vendor boards as I sad were usually mounted in a sun dimensioned carrier
frame.
And reason for all this explanation was that they used a third part
vendor's SMD interface.
As to the connections to go outside the rack, all the systems I saw had
2 or so smd drives and were racked in a 6' bay with room for a tape
drive at the top, system in the center, and drives @ the bottom, and so
no need for external.
For what it's worth, my Sun 3/140 has a Fujitsu 9-track at the top of
the rack, and two Eagles at the bottom of the rack (VME chassis in the
middle), wired to the SMD disk controller with the "external" D-sub
cables, and it's all contained within one rack.